Spring 09 Fashion: And also why Fashion Matters

Jeez. Wow I fell behind on this thing. I blame the liberal media and my inherent mavrickness. And also inertia, a full plate time wise, and the need for something to give.

Anyways. I'm here now. So that's what matters. But anywho I wanted to do a blog of some of my favorite things from the past few weeks of the spring 09 fashion shows in New York, Paris, London, and Milan. New York and London are very underepresented. Mostly because I thought both were pretty boring. Milan was a lot better. And then Paris was however much better Milan was than New York and London, times a billion. So a lot of these are from Paris.

I've picked my five favorites(no mean task) which sort of grab at what I liked best in general from the past few weeks. But I have all of my favorite looks over on flickr here. I didn't label them there however. But if you see one that you don't know where it's from, you can always ask me. I pulled the pics off of style.com and most of them are from the Chanel, Vivienne Westwood, Marni, Karl Lagerfeld, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, and Christian Lacroix shows.

Here are my five favorite looks:



1.
This was my absolute favorite thing from all of the shows. It's from Karl Lagerfeld's brilliant collection. The tatoo jewelery I love more than death. I love the whole joined pant thing that was all over the place(and probably best done at YSL). I just love how cool and futuristic and comfortable yet elegant and hard this looks. It's so many things at once, but it's all awesome. I love it. This was also from the Lagerfeld show:

2.
This is from Yves Saint Laurent which was probably my second favorite show after Marni. And these metallic drop pants were a big reason why. I love how it looks like this crazy wet metal. The shoes I also love. It is kind of the logical progression of that gladiator shoe, but looks oh so much better. I wish I had saved a close up, because the heal looks like the eiffel tower which is very neat. There were actually three pieces like this, but I picked this one because I heart green.

3.This is just two of the many many many looks I loved from Marni. Marni was far and away my favorite show. It made me the most excited, and led to the most immediete changes in my personal fashion. This show officially shoved me onto the knee high bandwagon. There's just a coolness about all of these patterns, and how effortlessly they are mixed and matched. It's this crazy liberation that is both put together, but not. And the jewelry at Marni was out of control. Consuelo Castiglioni, I love her for this collection. It's all so fun but so classy.

4.
Viveanne Westwood was another huge favorite. Her clothes had this cultured pirate feel to them, and felt really versatile and fun. Plus I believe her clothes were green friendly. I call the first look up there superhero chic. But yeah. She had a TON of great stuff, and I definitely recommend going through her whole collection.

5.
These are from Alexander Mcqueen, who Mare kind of turned me onto. My favorite things from his collection was the crazy patterened dresses like the first two here. And then I included the third one because it's the evolution of a cool dress that Mare was talking about to me earlier in the month.

6.I don't know that I'd wear much of any of what Givenchy rolled out. But as an artist I will definitely steal the ideas. Riccardo Tisci called these looks Western Bondage. Which kind of takes Narciso Rodriguez's bondage wear from in New York and ups the ante with this compeltely fantastic western tilt. Jean Paul Gaultier I think also put out a collection which was like this for Hermes. But I think the Givenchy collection better culls in the idea. At any rate, if you see a Western Bondage comic book from me at some point, well....this is where that idea started.

7.John Galliano was initially disapointing to me, but as time passes I'm returning to it more and more. I like the color pallette he was using. And the hats and wigs, which I loved from the start, only increase in fantasticness. I just love how light everything is.

7.
Chanel was out of control. It was just this endless stream of incredible class and comfort. I actually liked it initially more than Galliano. But it hasn't really had the staying power for me, and it's kind of slipped behind some of the more exciting ideas.

8. I actually enjoyed Louis Vuitton a lot. Everything looks like a million bucks. And I liked the sort of tribilist flourishes on the bags(not pictured here really...ha).

9.
Christian Lacroix was really good. Not better than some of the other shows. But there was some fun with polka dots and diffrent patterns, and just in general some good stuff to be excited about.

10.
Mason Martin Margiela was scary fun.



Honorable mentions:

I liked Vera Wang a lot. I didn't find anything there like wholly creative or inspiring. But I've always liked her clothes. She makes clothes I'd feel cool wearing. So I can't not mention her. I like her sense of color, and I like how she puts the outfits together.

Narciso Rodriguez was probably my favorite New York show. I liked all of the crazy bondage wear he put out. This red dress was the highlight, and for the longest time I thought it was going to be the highlight of the season for me. I'm glad I was wrong.

Anyways. Like I said at the beginning. If you go here you can see all of my favorite 71 diffrent looks I saw. If you are so inclined.

And as an addendum to this, since this blog is primarily about magic. Fashion is magic, just like all of the other arts are. The way you can shape shift with fashion, the way that diffrent clothes can change how you feel and how you present yourself, and both your perceptions and people's perceptions of you is one of the definite elements to magic. And I think a lot of times there's a certain subset of of people in this world who don't see the point, and just are like...well I'll wear whatever I find when I stumble to it in the dead of morning...so I think it's worth, especially in times when the economy is tanking all over the world, to kind of state the case for fashion. I think even during the great depression, fashion had a role in making people feel better. Maybe you are poor and getting your ass kicked by the economy, but you can jump outside of that reality with the right outfit. Or you can even dress yourself to underscore that reality, as a kind of silent martyr to that time. There's so many ways you can go with it. But all of them are influential and all of them are as important as any art. Fashion like books, music, movies, comics, are the stories we tell ourselves. And it's one of the ways in which we change, adapt, defend, and attack.

As a magician one of the primary things you have to experience to understand the ways in which your will is imparted into the oozy woozy is that anything that you leave to chance that is under your control can be a weakness. If you aren't controlling your fashion, you're not controlling your identity, and you're giving away needless amounts of power that you could otherwise be using in your service.

There's a reason that priests, rabbis...ect. all have sort of ritual garb. Clothes are infinitely important, as is how you use them.

So yeah. That's my pre-emptive strike to the people who may read this and be non-plussed by the idea that I would focus this much energy on this topic.

While I'm at it though.

You could support some awesome artists who I'm friends with, who do the whole fashion kerbabble out of the Chicago-ish area.

http://www.effineffigy.com/

They've actually got a lot of really cool guy stuff for my male readership. Like laser beams and werewolves type stuff. So check it out.